I'm a big fan of the New York Times Magazine's weekly column, The Ethicist. I'm not a big fan, however, of the column's namesake, Randy Cohen. He is often much too consequentialist for my liking, too simplistic is his ethical…
Read More The Ethicist Gets it Right with “A Facebook Teaching Moment”
I've returned from the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I presented an early draft of a paper based on my critique of the “Taste, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release. The paper was…
Read More Debrief: Computer Ethics/Philosophical Enquiry 2009 in Corfu, Greece
[UPDATE: The final paper has been published in Ethics and Information Technology]Next week I will be attending the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry in Corfu, Greece, where I will be presenting an early draft of a paper…
Read More Draft Paper: “But the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook
Last month I noted that Google's Street View service was being challenged by German data privacy authorities, who insisted that Google must permanently remove personally-identifying images from their databases (not just blur them in the user interface). Google argued that…
Read More Google Bows to German Data Privacy Demands, but Only Germany
The West Bend library controversy continues to escalate....with calls for book burning and growing national exposure (and, unfortunately, ridicule). Here's the (abridged) history and escalation: [Updated on 6/19/09 to include ABC News coverage, and 7/22/09 to include CNN] 02/15/2009: Ginny…
Read More West Bend Library Controversy Continues to Escalate
Today, a six page letter was sent to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, asking Google to honor the important privacy promises it has made to its customers and protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption…
Read More Dear Google: Make Security and Privacy the Default in the Cloud
Geert Lovink, one of the premier theorists of new media and network culture, has posted a set of "Web 2.0 Theses," puncturing the ethos and mythology the surrounds Web 2.0 and contemporary internet fetishism. Here's my quick summary, but I…
Read More Web 2.0 Theses by Ippolita, Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter
Here is my First Law of Social Networking: social networking sites are incentivized to promote the open and unfettered flow of mountains of personal information. Social networks' ability to make money through contextual and/or behavioral-targeted advertising is dependent on users…
Read More The Laws of Social Networking: Promote Open Flows of Information, Make Privacy Hard
The West Bend Community Memorial Library board held a public meeting this evening to consider the request from the "West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries" that the library remove books they consider to be "obscene" or "child pornography" from a…
There's been a flurry of news recently about an article from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University researchers showing that secret questions used to recover forgotten passwords aren't so secret after all. As reported in Technology Review: In a study involving…
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